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The Flack

This weblog attempts to shine a brighter light on the subtle role public relations plays in politics, popular culture, journalism, business/finance, entertainment, technology, social media, consumer marketing and sports.

Unfiltered Kool-AidToday

Hasn't the mainstream media learned its lesson? Didn't the unquestioned pronouncements that led to this failed administration give practicing journalists sufficient reason to say enough is enough?

Jay Rosen tweets us to a post on The Atlantic's Daily Dish blog:

jayrosen_nyu Sullivan: Until Palin gives a full press conference, cable news should stop putting her road shows in the rotation. Agree? Andrew Sullivan's post concludes with this:

What the Palin-McCain campaign wants is all give and no take: an indirect propaganda filter and the outrageous precedent of no press conferences in presidential campaigns. This is an assault on democracy. It is closer to Russian or Georgian democracy than American. If cable news continues to enable this chilling process, they will become complicit.

Enough.

In dealing with the media filter, the last thing a PR person needs to transmit is a sense that he or she can somehow cont

Flack FlapOctober 3

Apparently the name of this blog caused a little kerfuffle among a few members of the PR Counselor's Academy.

In a string of comments, one Beltway-based "counselor" took umbrage with the idea that PRSA would have the audacity to invite a PR pro who pens a blog with this particular name to moderate a PRSA panel at the National Conference in several weeks time.

"You certainly don't get rid of a bad brand by repeatedly using it even with a disclaimer. I wouldn't tell my clients to do that and certainly advise my PRSA colleagues not to do that either. I am not shy telling my journalist colleagues that I don't want them to use that term."

Actually, this Tuesday yours truly will preside over a PRSA-sponsored teleseminar featuring some of the brightest bulbs in the PR and social media worlds. Here's a link with more details. There's still time to sign up.

Another PR "counselor" from New Jersey p

The Journalist's TableauOctober 2

John Batelle may not agree, but Danny Sullivan certainly will remember: Google once had a competitor in search.

Cambridge, MA-based search engine Northern Light, a client back in the day, happened to produce more relevant results than the fledgling Google (though admittedly not as fast).

We were so confident in the engine's abilities that we prodded our client to mount a Pepsi Challenge on the burgeoning boys from Mountain View. What's more, Northern Light included in its database digitized content that it indexed from traditional publications and journals, which it sold at a small premium.

I loved this client, not only for its ability to ferret out surprisingly relevant nuggets of information, but for its staff of trained library scientists who knew a thing or two about tooling with taxonomies. Periodically, those research librarians would curate the NL database to produce a special section containing the most insightful links about a given topic, e.g., the Olympics, the environment, best millennium sites.

In the last week or so, we could have used these curious curato

See No EvilSeptember 30

The Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin today draws our attention to the exuberance displayed by those financial titans whose companies were a hair's breath from insolvency.

In the piece, he cites buoyant prognostications by the CEO or CFOs of Wachovia, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, all of whom made the media rounds to extol the virtues of their (failing) enterprises.

"It is a conundrum that C.E.O.’s of troubled companies seem always to face. In an effort to bolster public confidence in their businesses, they give interviews and try to put on a happy face — right before their companies go off a cliff." If I were an investor watching these corporate chiefs wax poetic on CNBC or elsewhere, I'd probably feel pretty good about their companies' prospects and maybe even toss a few dollars their way. I'm sure I wouldn't be alone in feeling assuaged by Alan D. Schwartz, Bear’s chi

Voodoo DoctorsSeptember 29

How much influence does post-debate coverage have in determining the evening's ultimate winner and loser?

A considerable amount, if you believe the WashPost's media watcher Howard Kurtz who today turned his sights on the "spin doctors" who were working their "voodoo" at Ole Miss following Friday's stand-off:

"Obama may have won the insta-polls after Friday's debate here at the University of Mississippi, but the McCain team won the spin war, a post-game ritual that quickly seeps into the punditry enveloping such events." Kurtz observed how each campaign's consiglieres and surrogates cherry-picked their candidate's freshly-minted sound bites to proselytize before a suppliant gaggle of journalists.

"Moments after the debate, the front of the tent resembled a crowded bazaar, festooned with huge yellow